The Water-Method Man

As he walked back to the Taschy, the street lamps came on, but spastically, fading on and off, without a trace of the clockwork precision of Iowa City; as if Viennese electricity was a recent, unsure improvement over gas.

Outside a Kaffeehaus on Plankengasse, a man spoke to him. 'Grajak ok bretzet,' he seemed to say, and Trumper paused, trying to place this queer language. 'Bretzet, jak?' the man said, and Trumper thought, Czech? Hungarian? Serbo-Croatian? 'Gra! Nucemo paz!' the man shouted. He was angry about something and waved his fist at Trumper.

Bogus asked, 'Ut boethra rast, kelk?' Old Low Norse never hurt a soul.

'Gra?' the man said suspiciously. 'Grajak, ok,' he added with

more confidence. Then he shouted eagerly, 'Nucemo paz tzet!'

Bogus was sorry he didn't understand, and began to say in Old Low Norse: 'Ijs kik--'

'Kik?' the man interrupted, smiling at Bogus. 'Gra, gra, gra! Kik!' he cried, trying to shake Trumper's hand.

'Gra, gra, gra!' replied Bogus, and shook hands with the man who weaved and mumbled, 'Gra, gra,' nodding with greater conviction before he turned away and stumbled off the curb, veering across the street stooped over; like a blind man groping for the opposite sidewalk, he aimed his feet and protected his crotch with his hands.

Bogus thought that it had been like a conversation with Mr Fitch. Then he glumly noted a crumpled scrap of newspaper on the sidewalk; it was unreadable, printed in what looked like the Cyrillic alphabet, the letters looking more like music than parts of words. He looked around for the little man, but there wasn't a trace of him. The article, torn from some paper in the queer language, looked important - phrases underlined with a ballpoint pen, comments scribbled emphatically in the margins in the same script - so he pocketed the strange scrap.

Trumper felt his mind floating. Back at the Taschy, he tried to focus on something familiar enough to bring it back home. He attempted to write a review of the Western movie, but his typewriter's umlaut keys distracted him, and he found that he'd forgotten the film's title. How Far Can You Get with an Arrow in Your Tit? Just then, as if by association, the bidets downstairs began their nightly flushing.

Bogus caught his own reflection in the ornate French window reaching nearly to the ceiling; he and his typewriter occupied only the bottom-corner pane. In an effort to rescue his small and sinking soul, he tore the review out of his typewriter and, avoiding umlauts, tried to write to his wife.

Pension Taschy

Spiegelgasse 29

Vienna 1, Austria

Dear Biggie:

Thinking of you, Colm, and you too, Biggie - the night your navel distended in East Gunnery, Vermont. You were in your eighth month, Big, when your belly button turned inside out.

We rode three hours from Great Boar's Head in Couth's old airy Volkswagen, with the sunroof missing. In Portsmouth it was cloudy; and in Manchester, Peterborough and Keene, it was cloudy too. And in each place, Couth said, 'I hope it doesn't rain.'

Three times I traded seats with you, Big. You were not comfortable. Three times you said, 'Oh God, I'm so big!'

'Like a full moon,' Couth told you. 'You're lovely.'

But you bitched away, Biggie - still smarting, of course, over my father's crude manner of referring to our lewd and irresponsible mating.

'Think of it this way,' Couth told you. 'Think how happy the baby will be having parents so close to its own age.'

'And think of the genes, Big,' I told you. 'What a masterful bunch of genes!'

But you said, 'I'm tired of thinking about this baby.'

'Well, you two will be together this way,' Couth said. 'Think of all the decisions you don't have to make now.'

'There wouldn't have been any decisions,' you told poor Couth, who was only trying to cheer you up. 'Bogus would never be marrying me if I wasn't going to have this baby.'

But all I said was, 'Well, here we are in Vermont,' looking up through the hole in the roof at the rusty girders of the bridge over the Connecticut.

You wouldn't let it drop, though, Biggie, even though we'd had this conversation several times before, and I wasn't about to be drawn into it again.

You said to me, 'Bogus, you wouldn't have married me, ever. I know it.'

And Couth, bless him, said, 'Then I'd have married you, Biggie - at full moon, half moon or no moon at all. I'd have married you, and I still would, if Bogus wasn't going to. And think what that would have been like, now I ask you ...' Then, hunched over the wheel, he turned his fabulous smile to you - showing you how he could manipulate with his tongue his front-four false teeth.

Which at least put a small smile on your face, Biggie. You were a little less pale when we got to East Gunnery.